Another Augustus reconquered mission down... 

This one is Tarsus, and I kinda barely managed to fumble my way through it.  This is actually my second victory on it -- the first one scraped by barely after every single thing possible going wrong -- food distribution failures, lack of workers, trouble with getting enough palaces, money problems, and more.

I did a bit better the second time, but still had some problems later on with labor shortages and money.  I think I'm learning more and more as I go through this campaign, though.  I skimmed a video of one of the mod/map devs on the Augustus team and they made it look like child's play in comparison.

One of my problems is that I failed to realize that the oil + wine import prices are exorbant on this map, meaning my grand mercury temple bonus should have definitely went to those resources instead of reducing the pottery/furniture consumption.

I also seem to be really inefficient with my workers, still, and take too long in in-game time to finish these missions.  I'm going to have to make sure that I'm making speedy progress towards all of my goals, and try to for example build the grand temples and other monuments as I go instead of stopping everything and waiting a while for them to be completed.

Somehow my exports didn't earn nearly as much money as they did in the video I watched, but again that could just be a general inefficiency thing.  The thing about Caesar 3 is that it's such a complex system with lots of emergent behavior, it's very easy for cities to start to break down later on because of fundamental mistakes that you made where you didn't have a solid foundation.  If you didn't have a solid grasp of how to effectively distribute food, for example, that's something that's probably not going to come into play until later on when there are more and more people to feed and then things start descending into chaos.

I ended up with way more population than the target amount, which I think again speaks to my general inefficiency.  I need to do less with more -- make less goods, stay on fewer people, etc.  This will make it so that I don't have to make as many palaces to hit my prosperity ratings, too.

Well, I'm ready to move on for now, so we'll see how the next map goes.  But again, I feel like there's just a really large amount of stuff to learn about and improve on.  That's what I like about this game!

On a different note, I put the WS POM+ switches back in my Cycle7 and I'm really loving it.  I'm hoping to order a switch tester batch at some point to see if I can find another switch that I can pull the trigger on because I really like it (that's how I ended up with these WS POM+s), just have to decide on all the ones I want to try first.

I know I said I was done with MOO2 a while back but that turned out not to be true, haha.  I've still been having fun playing with Uncreative races, and such.  It's still fun...

Um...I guess maybe I can talk a little bit about not-video-games too?  I'm starting to try and get back into the swing of life in general this week, which has been promising so far.  Stopping by Teance was nice, though I spent the majority of the time there stuck thinking about something for work.  I played a bit of DDR today and tomorrow I'm going to try to head out to dance, so we'll see how that goes.  I have a bunch of social activities lined up for the weekend and I know that's something I had been missing as I was stuck at home over the holidays with Covid so that should be good for me, I'm sure.

For a while I was also feeling pretty glum and blah about Rhythm Quest, owing to not feeling like I've been accomplishing much (not just with RQ, but in general with life) and having a lack of purpose (being sick and not really getting to do much or feeling much motivation will do that, I guess).  I'm trying to reclaim the "fun" in working on it again and trying to escape the feeling that it's a burden that's weighing me down; today and yesterday were pretty good successes in that regard and I did some good work on the level browser.  Hopefully I can keep it up...

My sleep schedule is still off but I'm at least back into the rhythm of cooking and all that.  Hopefully things can continue to look up......